The purpose of the Institutional Development Award (IdeA) Program is to foster health-related research and increase the competitiveness of investigators through support of faculty development and enhancement of the research infrastructure of institutions located in states with historically low aggregate success rates for grant awards from the NIH (RFA#RR-00- 003). Thus, we propose to establish a Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE), with the thematic focus of Functional Genomic/Proteomic Analysis of Bacterial-Host Interactions. The proposed COBRE will be headed by an establish NIH-funded investigator and includes three new investigators and an established investigator who do not have a prior history of NIH R01 support. This is a state-wide initiative that includes the three major publicly-supported research institutions in the state of Oklahoma: 1) the University of Oklahoma (OU), 2) the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), 3) Oklahoma State University (OSU) and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), a private research institute located near the OUHSC campus. The proposed Bioinformatics Core Facility will provide the computer hardware and software support necessary for coordination of all aspects of primer design and picking, image processing, and data analysis required by participants of this proposal. In addition, the Bio-informatics Core Facility will present an opportunity for Computer Science students to gain experience working in bio-informatics and with biomedical research personnel to design and implement new software.